Rifkin, a fellow at the Wharton School Executive Education Program, is
known for his Hegelian objections to modern capitalist trends (see his
earlier work Time Wars for his fears of the impact of computers on
society, for instance). In The Age of Access, Rifkin uses private
property ownership, a sacred tenant of capitalism, to critique a recent
development in business: access to services and "commodification" of
experience. Those familiar with William Gibson's work (Neuromancer,
Count Zero, etc.) will recognize his well-developed near-future
scenario of corporate control of all vital information and the
commodification of experience.

Some examples Rifkin cites are:

Leasing: This is not limited to automobiles anymore. Now, even
seeds farmers use to grow their crops may not be reused; farmers must pay
for the right to plant Monsanto-provided seeds each year.

Outsourcing: As has been the case for years, companies are
aggressively divesting themselves of capital-intensive functions and
farming out non-core competencies to contractors at lower costs than they
experienced with the functions housed internally.

Franchising: McDonald's, Super 8, Subway, you name it, those
businesses are for the most part not owned by the home office, but are
operated under licensing agreements with the grantee's franchising entity.

The commodification of cultural experiences: Native American
casinos, guided tours of restored or replicated historical sites (Colonial
Williamsburg, for instance), Disneyland and, perhaps worst of all, malls,
are taking the place of authentic cultural exposure.

While Rifkin acknowledged he and his wife enjoy taking guided tours when
on holiday abroad, the fundamental question remains: at what time does the
admission ticket no longer buy you a look at the past or the unvarnished
facts but instead a commodity? When is history class replaced by a branded
experience straight out of an MBA marketing class?

Rifkin also criticizes "gated" communities, which block the free flow of
traffic, and "planned" communities, the first of which was Disney's
Celebration, Florida. He notes on pages 116 and 117 the Celebration
marketing literature pitched the development as a recapturing of the good
old days when children could safely wander the streets at night while
neighbors met and got to know each other on the streets. The problem, Rifkin
argues, is that the community has no sense of history, but is instead an
engineered experience, devoid of the years of development of, for example,
Brooklyn in the 1920s.

Underlying all these developments is of course the World Wide Web. While
Rifkin stated in a lecture at Washington, DC-area bookstore Prose and Poetry
(attended by the reviewer) that he would not hope to see it disappear and
that there is a vast amount of good to come from the web, he feels there is
a potential hazard for users: networks rather than communities develop and
people interact only if they have similar interests and professions, rather
than because they live on the same block or floor. With information
technology, misinformation can and of course has been spread, and virtual
experiences could eventually become substitutes for real ones. Rifkin
posits:

In a society where virtually everything is accessed, however, what
happens to the personal pride, obligation, and commitment that go with
ownership? And what of self-sufficiency? Being propertied goes hand in
hand with being independent. Property is the means by which we gain a
sense of personal autonomy in the world. When we access the means of our
existence, we become far more reliant on others. While we become more
connected and interdependent, do we risk at the same time becoming less
self-sufficient and more vulnerable?

The shift in the structuring of human relationships from ownership to
access appears to invite a trade-off of sorts whose outcome is far from
certain. Will we liberate ourselves from our possessions, only to lose a
sense of obligation to the things we fashion and use? Will we become more
embedded in networks of relationships, only to become more dependent on
powerful networks of corporate suppliers?

These questions become even more important when it comes to the
temporizing of living arrangements. Again, in The Age of Access,
space gives way to time, and human attention becomes more scarce and coveted
than physical location. Place, which for so long provided context and helped
characterize a person's very being in the world, is less relevant in today's
high-speed, highly mobile society.

While Rifkin's arguments and concerns are well-intended and have merit,
they surely represent a worst-case scenario and fail to take into account
the adaptability of the human species to keep itself free and remain a
social being. (Surely there must have been a cave dweller that foresaw
nothing but disaster upon the discovery of fire and the invention of the
wheel.) Over the millennia humans have adapted to their changing environment
and seem now to be better off as a whole than ever before. In the end,
Rifkin is probably correct: human interaction is changing and will most
likely continue to change, and businesses are causing people to become
unpropertied. The real question is one of impact. Will the governments keep
industry in check and stop a scenario reminiscent of the movie Rollerball or
a Gibsonian nightmare, or will society evolve into one in which communities
and relationships are created in different ways? One would suspect the
latter, while keeping an eye out to avoid the former.

Consequences Rifkin has warned us of in the past have failed to
materialize over society in general (the Time Wars scenario of
computers basically ruining people's circadian rhythms and certain doomsday
predictions is the one that has played itself out to a significant extent),
but his work is unfailingly well-researched, intelligent, and an accurate
description of the status quo. His worries about the future remind us of the
slippery slope of dehumanization, a very necessary task for those concerned
with society's future.

Postscript: Well after this book was written, on June 22, 2000, Microsoft
announced it would transform its entire software strategy to an
internet-based, subscription-enabled access model. While the full
implementation is a few years away, and Sun and Oracle have been mentioning
this kind of thing for some time, if the plan germinates the "propertied"
aspect of software usage will have gone the way of the Monsanto seed.

--Douglas W. Frye, Ph.D. Candidate at George Mason University's
Institute of Public Policy